Two Hearts, Two Mouths

Description

For three years, Alma Carlile has been switching daily between two lives in two distinct versions of Lexington, Kentucky. Unhappily married in one world and in love with someone else in the other, a pregnancy in both realities forces her to confront herself and her bifurcated life. She hatches a plan to end the back and forth. Will she get what she wants or become trapped forever in the world she longs to escape?

Across the same timeline and in the same two worlds, Alma’s one true friend and elder, Lucky Parnell, negotiates the complexities and desires of her own lives but without the vantage point of knowing herself across both. A successful restaurateur, she finds herself longing for physical and spiritual communion with another but worries age has put happiness beyond her reach. Love presents itself. Will her own fear and doubt keep her alone?

Throughout it all, a Greek chorus (with a Kentucky bent) comments and gestures toward the wonder and strangeness of life, regardless of who is living it or what can truly be known.

A criss-crossing story of memory, desire, chosen family, and epistemology, Two Hearts, Two Mouths explores the tensions between what women want, what we can get, and who we can count on.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Reva Russell English
Published: 05/26/2026
Publisher: Compass Press
ISBN: 9798993529622
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 0.43″ H x 8.50″ L x 5.50″ W

About the Author
Russell English, Reva: – Originally from the windswept plains of Kansas, Reva Russell English is a preacher’s kid turned writer, farmer, and musician. She won the Betty Gabehart Prize for Fiction in 2018 and has been a finalist for the Thomas Wolfe fiction prize. Her short stories and essays can be found scattered throughout a handful of small, regional journals, and she has lived in green, sweet-smelling Kentucky since 2010. Two Hearts, Two Mouths is her first novel.